Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [2]
Colette Rousseau kissed Younger once on either cheek and extended a slender arm to Littlemore. She had green eyes, graceful movements, and long dark hair.
“Glad to meet you, Miss,” said the detective, recovering gamely.
She eyed him. “So you’re Jimmy,” she replied, taking him in. “The best and bravest man Stratham has ever known.”
Littlemore blinked. “He said that?”
“I also told her your jokes aren’t funny,” added Younger.
Colette turned to Younger: “You should have come to the radium clinic. They’ve cured a sarcoma. And a rhinoscleroma. How can a little hospital in America have two whole grams of radium when there isn’t one in all of France?”
“I didn’t know rhinos had an aroma,” said Littlemore.
“Shall we go to lunch?” asked Younger.
Where Colette alighted from the bus, a monumental triple arch had only a few months earlier spanned the entirety of Fifth Avenue. In March of 1919, vast throngs cheered as homecoming soldiers paraded beneath the triumphal Roman arch, erected to celebrate the nation’s victory in the Great War. Ribbons swirled, balloons flew, cannons saluted, and—because Prohibition had not yet arrived—corks popped.
But the soldiers who received this hero’s welcome woke the next morning to discover a city with no jobs for them. Wartime boom had succumbed to postwar collapse. The churning factories boarded up their windows. Stores closed. Buying and selling ground to a halt. Families were put out on the streets with nowhere to go.
The Victory Arch was supposed to have been solid marble. Such extravagance having become unaffordable, it had been built of wood and plaster instead. When the weather came, the paint peeled, and the arch began to crumble. It was demolished before winter was out—about the same time the country went dry.
The colossal, dazzlingly white and vanished arch lent a tremor of ghostliness to Madison Square. Colette felt it. She even turned to see if someone might be watching her. But she turned the wrong way. She didn’t look across Fifth Avenue, where, beyond the speeding cars and rattling omni-buses, a pair of eyes was in fact fixed upon her.
These belonged to a female figure, solitary, still, her cheeks gaunt and pallid, so skeletal in stature that, to judge by appearance, she couldn’t have threatened a child. A kerchief hid most of her dry red hair, and a worn-out dress from the previous century hung to her ankles. It was impossible to tell her age: she might have been an innocent fourteen or a bony fifty-five. There was, however, a peculiarity about her eyes. The irises, of the palest blue, were flecked with brownish-yellow impurities like corpses floating in a tranquil sea.
Among the vehicles blocking this woman’s way across Fifth Avenue was an approaching delivery truck, drawn by a horse. She cast her composed gaze on it. The trotting animal saw her out of the corner of an eye. It balked and reared. The truck driver shouted; vehicles swerved, tires screeched. There were no collisions, but a clear path opened up through the traffic. She crossed Fifth Avenue unmolested.
Littlemore led them to a street cart next to the subway steps, proposing that they have “dogs” for lunch, which required the men to explain to an appalled French girl the ingredients of that recent culinary sensation, the hot dog. “You’ll like it, Miss, I promise,” said Littlemore.
“I will?” she replied dubiously.
Reaching the near side of Fifth Avenue, the kerchiefed woman placed a blue-veined hand on her abdomen. This was evidently a sign or command. Not far away, the park’s flowing fountain ceased to spray, and as the last jets of water fell to the basin, another redheaded woman came into view, so like the first as almost to be a reflection, but less pale, less skeletal, her hair flowing unhindered. She too put a hand on her abdomen. In her other hand was a pair of scissors with strong, curving blades. She set off toward Colette.
“Ketchup, Miss?” asked Littlemore. “Most take mustard, but I say